African Women and Cinema--Stories of Mothers, Practices of Motherwork Reflections by Beti Ellerson
Image: Mossane and her mother
Mossane by Safi Faye
On
the timeline of women's lives are the myriad stories of the hope of
childbirth, the fear of it not happening, societal expectations of
motherhood, the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, memories
of mothers, stories of aging and caregiving. Of these experiences,
African women in cinema weave stories of mothers--many of them, their
own.
"[Women and motherwork are]…in the center of what are typically seen as disjunctures, the places between human and nature, between private and public, between oppression and liberation." Hence, Patricia Hill Collins's term "motherwork" blurs the dichotomies in theorizations of motherhood and mothering that make distinctions between "private and public, family and work, the individual and the collective, identity as individual autonomy and identity growing from the collective self-determination of one’s group…." Furthermore, she locates the practice of "mothering the mind" in the myriad relationships between community othermothers. (Patricia Hill Collins, Shifting the Center: Race Class and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood)
Similarly, as a theoretical framework, Catherine Obianuju Acholonu's notion of motherism involves the "dynamics of ordering, reordering, creating structures, building and rebuilding in cooperation with mother nature at all levels of human endeavor." Closely related to the concept of motherism is Wanuri Kahiu's idea of mothering nature: “my metaphor about Pumzi (2009) is life and sacrifice and that we ourselves have to mother mother nature. That we have to make sacrifices in order to live in this world. And that we have to know that our own behaviour will affect generations to come.” (Wanuri Kahiu, TEDx Forum On Afrofuturism In Popular Culture)
Following is a compilation of stories of mothers and practices of motherwork:
Of Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, Mère-bi: the mother of all--a title which she carries with great aplomb--Patricia Hill Collins's theory of “motherwork” and “othermothering” aptly applies. She has mentored scores of Senegalese and African feminists and nurtured a generation of Senegalese film spectators who have taken on the role of cultural producer in the forging of a Senegalese cinema culture.
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Sarah Maldoror: "I am one of those modern women who try to combine work and family life, and just like it is for all the others, it's a problem for me. Children need a home and a mother. That's why I try to prepare and edit my films in Paris during the long summer vacation when the children are free and can come along." (Interview with Elin Clason, cited in Women and Film No 5-6 1974).
In a tribute to her mother Sarah Maldoror, Henda Ducados had this to say: …It is also important to talk about Sarah as a woman, and talk about this great love story that she had with our father which led to the two projects, Sambizanga and Monangambee… her view about feminism, about being a single mother, female head of household, taking care of two daughters and making sure that the collectivity was very important. Not looking at the individual but at the collective…She always considered my sister and I as individuals. It was tough to deal with that as a child, but as an adult I appreciate that even more. Here we are, I am asked to talk about our mother… Our childhood was never easy but it was fun and unpredictable…People coming in and out of the house all of the time, goodhearted strangers babysitting us while Sarah traveled the world. Later on during my history class at the university, I was astonished by the fact that most of the historical figures of the sixties stayed with us in our kitchen and ate with us. There were very few rules that I could remember, but one was to leave regrets/adversity at the door. So thank you Sarah for being so courageous, and passing this on to us, as you gave us the strength to face my fears and venture out and have an impact in this world…
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Safi Faye, ethnologist, cineaste, peasant, mother—she claims these intersecting selves with pride. This simultaneity of identities exemplifies the multiplicity of her life in the same way that she reflects them in her films and their characters. Hence, such a portrait shows the interconnection of her experiences—whether in Africa, the countryside, Europe, while demystifying conceptions of African women as a whole—and in particular rural-dwelling African women. Throughout her life and through her films, empowering, giving voice, has been her leitmotif.
She had this to say about being a mother and making the film Mossane: In the film, Mossane is thirteen and a half years old. When one has a fourteen-year-old daughter, her changes are visible; each photo is different from the other, yet the girl is always the same. There are transformations that a mother perceives of her daughter at that age. It is this that I wanted to sculpt. I wanted to recreate a beauty that only exists at this age. Afterwards, she would be too old, before she was too young. Before, she did not respond, after fourteen years old she complains “mama, I don’t want this, I don’t want that.” Thus, I used this occasion to glorify this girl. To make as you stated, a myth. It’s also a tragedy. I don’t know how to explain it. I tried to take my imagination as far as it could go with this girl that I also loved, who everyone in the village loved, who I hope the audience will also love.
Safi spoke often about her mother. How much she supported her in her career. Though there were as many times when she shared bittersweet thoughts about her not having a formal education, which gave her fewer choices and economic possibilities, that her mother accepted her fate in life. One could sense also her feelings about the contrast between them: she stated that she made films so that her mother, who was not literate, could read the images. She recalled that at the beginning of her career she envisioned making a film about women like her mother who spent most of their time at home. She wondered what they expected out of life, and hoped to find out. Forty years later she talked about the developing stages of her film project which would focus on where she came from, following her journey from the beginning, where she was born, in the Gueule-Tapée neighborhood; a life résumé of sorts, and then she would be done. Though neither of these two projects came to be during her lifetime, in between this first musing and the last meditation are her reflections on African people, African women, and like them, she attempted throughout her life and cinematic journey to “stand up for herself as best she could.”
And, as in so many of her films, her camera focuses its lens on some aspect of motherhood. In Fad’jal, a young woman, during the last moments of labor and when giving birth, is surrounded by a cohort of women who give her care and support. Childbirth, the ultimate symbol of life, is at the same time part of the cycle of existence in the village, along with work and death.
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African women filmmakers highlight the solidarity among the entourage of women who offer childcare when they need to take time alone to work or to travel. Within their circle of women, these practices of othermothering encompass the grandmother, friends, cousins… Similarly, Ethiopian filmmaker Lucy Gebre-Egziabher emphasizes the experiences of many women as they take on the role of filmmaker in tandem with raising children, she recalls seeing a photograph: [While] behind the camera, she had her baby behind her on her back and she was directing. That was a most powerful image; it has stayed with me. To me that is an African woman filmmaker. She doesn't have the luxury to disengage her role as a wife or a mother and then become a filmmaker; she has to incorporate everything. (Sisters of the Screen: African Women and the Cinema)
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Kenyan filmmaker Anne Mungai, who recalls the scene described by Lucy Gebre-Egziabher, realized that the most effective way to get her film completed was to incorporate her baby and her duties as a mother in her filmmaking activities: I had to go with my sixth-month-old baby on location. The village people had never seen a woman with a camera. I was holding my baby, carrying film tapes, they are really wondering how I am going to do it. I figure that the best thing to do was to breastfeed the baby, put it to sleep and then continue directing. The baby kept interfering, each time that I started to direct right in the middle it started to cry. I didn't know what to do, it clicked in my mind that the baby needed attention since I was no longer feeding it. So what I did was take the baby, give it to one of the people in the crowd, and make it part of the cast. (Harry Cahill, producer. Africa World Film. World of Film Foundation. 1993)
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Similarly, while optimistic about women's capacity to juggle a filmmaking career and motherwork, Zimbabwean Porcia Mudavhanhu recalls a heartbreaking experience that tested her resolve: the greatest challenge in my career was when my youngest daughter refused to breast feed at six months because I was away for five days on a shoot. It was painful for me to come to terms with it, as I felt I had let my daughter down. (Wild track Newsletter, Zimbabwe)
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The motherwork of African women in the instances where their daughters have influenced their work is multiple. Safi Faye coordinated her experiences as mother, homemaker and filmmaker as her film
Mossane was evolving in her head, doing her daily chores and assisting her daughter with her schoolwork. Her endearing love for her daughter played an important part in the choice of theme and many of the decisions regarding the film:
I don't know how Mossane
(1996) was born. All that I know is that I have a daughter, my only daughter, who I cherish. And perhaps through these feelings I wanted to cherish Mossane, and to make her the most beautiful, the purest, and most virtuous. Safi Faye also had a desire to mirror her daughter in terms of her age-related experiences; her daughter and the protagonist were both fourteen years old, an age that she describes as a magical and elusive period of childhood. After a long and frustrating search, it was Safi Faye's daughter who suggested that her friend Magou Seck audition for the role. The affection and genuine love that she developed for the daughter/character was reflected off screen. As she was an orphan, Safi Faye took her into her family. (Sisters of the Screen: African Women and the Cinema, 2003)
Similarly, South African Zulfah Otto Sallies was fascinated by her daughter Muneera's evolution which is how the documentary
Through the Eyes of My Daughter (2004) came about. “I don’t understand who that 15 year old who sleeps in my house is!” She uses her camera as the means to find out. In the film she focuses the lenses on her family, zooming into their world in the Bo-Kaap community of South Africa for an entire year. The cross-generational response to contemporary society is the thread running through the film, sometimes showing differing perspectives regarding the realities that the current generation confronts. The evolving story contrasts the apartheid-generation of Zulfah with teen-ager Muneera’s experiences in a democratic South Africa. In full view of the camera, one has a glimpse of the strong bond of the mother-daughter relationship. Zulfah Otto-Sallies invites the viewer into their world with all of the unpredictability that comes as a result. See:
https://africanwomenincinema.blogspot.com/2011/10/zulfah-otto-sallies-filming-bo-kaap.html***
In Salem Mekuria's desire to chronicle the experiences of her brother and her best friend, fighting on opposite sides during the Ethiopian revolution and civil war that ensued, the documentary film Ye Wonz Maibel (Deluge, 1995) unfolds. The story was inspired by Salem Mekuria's daughter, born and raised in the United States, who longed to know about the fate of her uncle. Hence, she was able to actively participate in the making of the film.
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Véronique Doumbé teamed with her daughter Malika Franklin to produce the film, Woman to Women (2013). Véronique describes the film in this way: The idea of Woman to Woman grew out of discussions with mothers of teenagers about issues relating to being a woman or becoming one. Producing Woman to Woman is exciting because it touches two areas that matter most in my life, being a mother and making films. Malika recalls her experiences with the film: I joined the film after my mother had already begun because I felt it was important to have a teenager's perspective. The film's intention is for mothers and daughters to better understand each other and to have open conversations. This could not be done if the conversation was told only through a mother's eyes. (From the Woman to Women Press Kit)
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FIFF Festival International du Film de Fribourg 2016 – Roundtable/Table ronde: Etre réalisatrice en Afrique | To be a woman filmmaker in Africa. Claire & Angèle, Nadia, Pocas, Rama, in conversation:
Claire Diao, moderator: We have talked about being a woman filmmaker, about solidarity, and now I would like to discuss the part about being a woman filmmaker in Africa. Some of you may have watched in the category New Territories, the film Mère-bi (The Mother of all) by Ousmane William Mbaye about his mother Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, the first professional journalist in Senegal, who was married to a professional man and raised four children. One moment she recounts that she travelled a great deal, produced many stories and her husband demanded that she return to work as a teacher, in other words that she “return to her place.” There was a blow up, and then a divorce. There is a particularity about your work in Africa, even though you may work between France and your respective country, in that there is the expectation that the woman takes care of the household and raise the children. You are also mothers, so the question that I would like to pose: Is family life compatible with a filmmaking career?
Nadia El Fani: It is totally incompatible, that is clear. We have much more difficulty finding the time than men to do our work. It is much more difficult to leave one’s children to go to work, especially when they are small. I have only one child, a daughter who is now 25 years old. I saw the men who travelled to festivals, conferences, to whatever event. I was able to only do so only once a month. It was very difficult for me and for the men they had no problem to go here and there. My male counterparts had their wives to take care of the children. I definitely know what it is like as I have lived it… My mother, who is French, came to Tunisia when she retired and helped me a great deal, as well as my entourage of friends— women’s solidarity worked well in that regard, my friends took care of my daughter when needed. I think it is also difficult for the children, but at the same time there is a certain pride to have a mother who works in this field which is rather unique…
Pocas Poscoal: It is very difficult. I was an editor for a long time, and there are also long working hours. Several times I brought my children to the editing room. There are a lot of guilty feelings also. Even when there was a chance to take a vacation, there is the question of taking the children and finishing the film, when working independently.
Rama Thiaw: It is a sacrifice. It is not a profession, between quotes, “for a woman”. I think this is a reason why there is less coalescing among women because there is not the time to go to smoke a cigar in the club and talk about the next film. [Laughter in the audience].
Angèle Diabang: Speaking of solidarity between women, as Nadia says, when I travel he has an entourage of women who takes care of him. And in fact he is able to do more than when I am there closed up in my office or in front of the computer. The house has more women when I am not there, when it is just the two of us. When I am gone, there is the grandmother, the friends, the cousins.
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Lilya, 16, remembers her mother Dalila Ennadre, who died on 14 May 2020 after a long battle with cancer: "While traveling, she called me several times a day and when she came back from a film shoot, she immediately resumed her role as mom and was happy to find the rhythm of the house, in particular to return to family meals at the table together: we discussed a lot, I told her about my day, she listened to me, advised me, and afterwards, she told me about her work and we also talked about it. It is also true that she was completely engrossed in her work like many filmmakers, in her daily life, her meal breaks and her conversations with her loved ones." (Source: leseco.ma)
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In the fictional semi-autobiographical film, The Body Beautiful (1991),
Nigerian-British Ngozi Onwurah casts her real-life mother, Madge, a
white woman, in a multilayered story at the intersection of
race--focusing on her bi-raciality, and the notion of beauty and the
body--using her mother's experience with the crippling effects of
arthritis, and her bout with breast cancer and the subsequent
mastectomy. She hauntingly illustrates the societal privileging of the
youthful, "perfect" body. It is especially moving to observe Ngozi
Onwurah's mother, Madge, as the survivor of breast cancer, willingly
present her body as text for the story, as her daughter explores this
complex and remarkable phenomenon.
***
While narrating in voice-off in Les Enfants du Blanc (2000),
Sarah Bouyain recalls her childhood summer vacations in Burkina Faso,
with her paternal grandmother, Jeanne Bouyain. She also remembers her
great grandmother Diouldé Boly who refused to speak in French because it
brought back painful memories. These remembrances form the basis of her
family-history meetings with her grandmother, visualized in the
documentary. Her recollections are framed in a sequence of questions to
which her grandmother responds in detail, sometimes elaborated by
elements of Sarah’s research, which the latter narrates in voice-off.
The internal journeys with her grandmother also entail voyages through
the family photo albums, chats together during daily chores. Her
grandmother’s remembrances uncover a little known phenomenon of French
history of which Jeanne’s mother was directly concerned: the abduction
and forced concubinage by French colonials of African women. The other
thread to the story is the forced placement of the mixed-race children
of these unions, often against the will of their families, into
orphanages; Sarah Bouyain’s grandmother, who later was able to rejoin
her mother, recalls this sad period in her life as her granddaughter
looks on mournfully. Sarah, filmmaker, researcher, family historian, is
also witness, inscribed into this aching multi-layered history of her
family. Though Sarah Bouyain attempted to distance herself from any
similarities to the protagonist’s story in the fiction film, Notre étrangère | The Place in Between
(2010)--in real life Sarah Bouyain's mother is white European and her
father is African, and her search is of a very different nature--there
are subtle aspects that give hints of an autobiographical consciousness:
the recurrent themes of belonging, language and place. Elements of
departure and return, the leitmotif of the film, are structured in
parallel stories. Amy, who has not had contact with her mother since she
was an infant, leaves France for Burkina Faso to find her. As the story
unfolds, it is revealed that she had left home years before en route to
France, in search of her daughter. The separation of
mother/othermother(s) and daughter/otherdaughter(s) is another powerful
thread that runs through the film.
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Claude Haffner focuses most of the story in Noire ici, Blanche là-bas | Footprints of My Other (2012)
on her second return voyage to the land of her birth. During her
initial visit she was accompanied by her mother. She describes this
visit as experiencing the reality of the Congo as she hid behind her
mother. The second journey, which was planned around the shooting of the
documentary, was made alone; having been “liberated”, she was searching
for her own place among her Congolese family. In the film she talks
about reconciling with her mother having better understood where she
comes from, beginning to respect her experiences, becoming closer to
her. Reconciliation of course implies that there were issues that had to
be resolved. She explains what prevented reconciliation before the
experience with making the film: I felt secondary to my mother’s
concerns about her family in the Congo. I thought she spent too much
time dealing with them and not enough on us. I suffered from her
"absence." With age, one finally understands the complexity of life, and
if one follows the path of wisdom, one is able to forgive. Moreover,
she realized that in order to tell the complexities of this story she
would have to enter into it. Hence, her autobiographical consciousness
unveiled during the filmmaking process. She explains: “The film
should redefine itself as the shooting unfolds in the same way that the
filmmaker redefines herself in relation to her initial idea and to her
subject. This is evident in the fact that in 2004 I could not foresee
that I would be expecting a child after having filmed in the Congo, and
that I would actually include myself, while pregnant, during the scenes
in Alsace. Somehow, the film helped me to define my identity and my
place between Europe and Africa and to become aware of the richness that
I possess to have come from a double culture or perhaps I should say,
multiple.” (African Women in Cinema Blog)
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In Orphanage of Mygoma (2008),
commissioned by Aljazeera, Taghreed Elsanhouri sets out to Sudan to make
a film about the children brought to the Mygoma Orphanage in Karthoum
after being abandoned by their unwed mothers. She encounters baby
Abdelsamih, blind, having lost his eyes to cancer as a baby, and
incorporates the emotional journey of growing close to him while making
the film. From this experience she evolved from exploring filmmaker to
ultimately, an engaging mother, he becomes her son.
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Aïcha Elhadj
Macky was only five years old when her mother died after childbirth. It
is this trauma that Aïcha, who is married, still without children,
reconstructs in L'arbre sans fruit | The Fruitless Tree (2016)
about infertility and its disorder. She starts with childbirth: the
calm, the esteemed advice of the midwife, the fatigue of the mother, the
arrival of the child. Then a spoken letter that refers back to it:
"Dear Mother, behind the camera, I tremble throughout my body"; and
before concluding: "In my sleepless nights, your spirit guides my
steps." gay. (African
Women in Cinema Blog)
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Tracing memories at the onset of cognitive decline, a mental health issue that family's face throughout the globe as an elder reaches her or his golden age, though for many, even before, is an increasingly visible theme in films. Karima Saïdi focuses the camera on her own mother Aïcha who develops Alzheimer’s. She constructs a film portrait journeying with her mother back into her past. She gives an intimate account of the conception and development of her documentary Dans la maison / A way home. As she describes the evolution of her mother’s condition to Dimitra Bouras in a video interview, how she dealt with it, the decisions she made while caring for her—the emotions of the moment surface. Her immediate response was to write/visualize her mother’s experiences/words before they ceased to be: “My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer and at that moment I found myself spending a lot of time with her, taking care of her, accompanying her, I began looking at her. It was strange, I looked at her, observed her. I felt that I had to capture, to keep, everything that was going to disappear. So I started keeping a journal. Having no other recourse, no longer able to keep her at home I had to put her in a care facility. Then I began to take photographs and recordings. Taking care of her, caring for her, being responsible for her also, obliged me to look at her, I was compelled to try to understand her...I was allowed to experiment with everything that I could to make a film. At one moment it was about being unafraid to find out, not arranging the truth as I wanted it to be. Here is where working with an editor as fine as Frédéric Fichefet was of utmost importance. Because I would have censured myself everywhere. I would have taken out everything. In fact there would have not been a film.That is what was interesting, to confront it, to see how the editor reacted to the content and how being aware of the power of certain images, moved us forward... More broadly, Mmabatho Montsho addresses the mulitple issues around cognitive decline especially in the context of caregiving, in the "hope of inspiring support and conversations about condition and the physical, psychological, and social burden on female family caregivers." The synopsis describes the film in this way: A devoted, resilient daughter, Abigail, juggles dealing with her elderly mother with dementia, Selma, while moving her from the family home. This dregs up her painful past - a family home that contains memories and nightmares. While her mother unconsciously haunts her by obsessively questioning “Where’s Desmond?” it forces Abigail to finally face her mother’s question.
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A subtext of the two fiction films, Sous la clarté de la lune and Pour la nuit, is death and separation from the African mother. At the beginning of Isabelle Boni-Claverie's film Pour la nuit (For
the Night, 2004), the young woman Muriel, raised by her European father
and African mother in France, buries her mother; it is at the funeral
that her shame of her mother’s African-ness, her mother’s speech, her
voice, surfaces. Both father and daughter reveal to each other for the
first time, at the site of the African woman’s reposed body, the
tensions that surrounded their relationship to her African-ness. The
father accuses the daughter of being ashamed of her mother because she
was African; the daughter accuses the father of not really being
interested in understanding his wife, knowing her deeply, knowing who
she was. Though this beginning is only a brief part of the story in this
fiction short, it provides the context for the emotional drama that
ensues as Muriel seeks to free herself. In Sous la clarté de la lune (Under the
Moonlight, 2004) by Apolline Traoré from Burkina Faso, young Martine
has become someone very different, having being raised in Europe by her
European father, rather than in Africa by her African mother. The
uprooted Martine, returns to Africa, discovering her African roots
through her mother. And yet, she does not realize the woman’s
relationship to her, as she was kidnapped by her father while still a
baby, a trauma of which her mother suffered a double loss, her daughter
and her voice, as she was rendered mute. Upon Martine's brief return the
mother recovers her voice and rediscovers her daughter, only to lose
her again to death.
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In Children of the Mountain (2016) by Priscilla
Yawa Anany a woman who gives birth to a deformed and sickly child.
Because she is criticized and blamed for her child’s conditions, she
becomes determined to do everything in her power to find a cure for him.
When all fails and she becomes hopeless, she is pushed to getting rid of
her child. (From film description)
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Françoise Ellong's W.A.K.A
- « pour son fils elle est prête à tout… » | “for her son she is ready
for anything” (2013) reveals the unraveling world of Mathilde/Maryline, a
single mother desperate to care for her child. Françoise has this to
say about the film: "The theme of the film was the result of a casual
conversation that I had when dining with friends. During the discussion,
I hear: "... in any case she is not a good mother." Is there a manual
somewhere that follows to the letter what automatically makes one a good
mother or not? Or does it depend on each person’s experience? The idea
of the film resulted from this. Prostitution is a pretext in the film to
talk about the journey and struggle of a woman—both as a woman and as a
mother." (African Women in Cinema Blog)
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Moroccan Maryam Touzani's Adam (2019)
centers on the inner experiences of Abla and Samia whose interior
journeys bring them together as they confront the myriad experiences of
motherhood. Abla, a widow with little means, caring for her young
daughter, brings into her household Samia, pregnant and unmarried, in a
society that condemns the situation in which she finds herself.
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Similarly, the eponymous character of the film Sofia (2018)
by Meryem Benm'Barek, is also pregnant in a Moroccan society that
criminalizes motherhood outside of marriage. She is encircled in a world
of women: mother, aunt, cousin, who work together to protect her and
also the honour of women.
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Cecile Mulombe Mbombe—cinematographer,
and Pauline Mulombe—filmmaker, two sisters, talk about their lives,
their experiences, and the film, Tout le monde a des raisons d'en vouloir à sa mère (Everyone
has Reasons to be Angry with her Mother) 2010, which they made
together. Pauline has this to say about the film: The protagonists, the
daughters...respect their cultural heritage but they want to live their
lives as they see fit. The film is located principally within the
context of tolerance, indeed acceptance, by their mother, of their
multi-culturalism and their reality. The youngest wants to enjoy herself
and grow and develop by making the most of European social and cultural
life. The middle daughter wants to utilize all of the possibilities
available to resolve her problems, even if it means doing things that
are unthinkable in her culture of origin, such as taking the birth
control pill when still an adolescent. The oldest, even if she does not
openly show her homosexuality, knows that she is 100%
